The very short version is I really like this phone and recommend it for anyone who likes the Google Pixel but is put off by the price. Now for the details!

The hardware is really nice, it feels solid and well put-together. Fair warning, it is a phablet and the formfactor is very large – without a case the phone is 154.2 x 74.1 x 7.25 mm. As a bit of an aside, if you’re a woman and have any wild ideas about putting your phone in your pocket I highly recommend eShakti jeans with the deep pockets option.

I also highly recommend a case, the phone feels kind of naked without one, plus it’s expensive and smashing it would suck a lot. The Otterbox case is what I went with because I want my phone to be as well-protected as possible. That case also gives the phone a more satisfying heft in your hand, it’s almost too light without a case.

Performance wise it’s great, which is maybe not great for getting my tab habit under control. Yes, I have a problem even on mobile :) It opens demanding apps (like Tap Tap Fish, which I have a terrible obsession with) faster than my last phone, the Nexus 5x and it performs the same with one app or a dozen open. Often the only way I figure out how many apps I left open is when I hit the recent apps button looking for one of them and ending up scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, to find it.

The screen is really nice too, it’s huge (you know, like you would expect from a phablet) and sharp and bright. Reading on it is a much nicer experience than it was on the Nexus 5x if only because it’s bigger, but I think the colours are brighter too.

Battery life on this phone is fantastic, I’m guessing the bigger form factor allows a much bigger battery. Even running that huge bright screen for hours (say if you’re extremely bored in an airport) won’t kill the battery. And even if it does, dash charging really does charge your phone back up incredibly quickly.

I can’t condone actually taking calls on speakerphone, but if you want to use the speaker for more civilized pursuits like listening to podcasts while you get ready in the morning, it’s pretty decent. I mean, it’s a smartphone speaker, you can only expect so much, but I can hear it from across the room without turning it up as loud as it will go, so that’s handy.

All I can tell you about the camera is that it exists, I don’t take a lot of pictures so I don’t have anything useful to say about it.

Updates have come steadily since getting the phone, and even if OnePlus stops supporting the phone it’s popular enough that there’s a good chance of finding a custom ROM to put on it.

Now for the cons:

Getting the phone was seriously painful. I ordered mine about 10 minutes after a coworker and got it days after he did. The OnePlus site just doesn’t like some credit cards for no particular reason, you may want to make sure your PayPal is setup to charge directly to your credit card so you still have some protection and use that to pay for the phone.

If you order anything from OnePlus, you need to resign yourself to the fact that they will ship your order when they damn well feel like it and not a second before. If you have a workable phone then the wait isn’t so bad, but if your primary phone died weeks ago and you’re using a ~5 year old phone it’s really painful to wait and wait and wait for your phone to finally show up. In other words, don’t order from OnePlus if you’re in a hurry to get your phone, especially if they’re running a launch event.

This is probably the meanest thing I will ever say on this blog, so brace yourself :) OnePlus support is LESS USEFUL THAN DHL SUPPORT. LESS USEFUL. To be worse than DHL at delivering packages, you would have to open the package and defile it before throwing it in the garbage, and yet somehow DHL support was able to tell me what was happening with my package and where to put my tracking number when OnePlus support had absolutely no idea what was going on. If you’re going to sell a phone comparable to the Pixel for around $250 less you’re going to have to cut corners somewhere, but seriously, OnePlus support is amazingly terrible. As in, so terrible I feel perfectly safe sassing them like this because it’s not going to make them noticeably less useful.

All that said, if you can stand to wait and wait and wait for it to show up, the phone really is excellent.